cornered circles

It isn’t as if they would rise up and physically run towards the light. I asked this to my relatives and they told me it’s the final show of respect. Then, personally, the problem comes with the word “show”. Perhaps they never meant that the lost nights of sleep is a simple showmanship of the departed’s importance. It could probably just be my malicious and cynical mind asking why would you stay up tired, watching over someone that will not leave its place. Yes, it. For what remains is a body, an object that once moved and has already had a last breath.

The person you once knew, laughed, and cried with, shared food with, has long gone and what remains is the vessel that let the experience be possible. And when you look over the glass; carefully choosing where the glare is the faintest, you realize you don’t know the face of the person lying inside the box. After wakeful nights, maybe you would also ask yourself about the person that has eternally left you, or reminisce, try to remember if you actually had that “special moment” or if he thought you something about life. After all, he was a father, a brother, a grandfather, a friend or a neighbor in his lifetime.

With rest comes the momentary but always expected questions on one’s own mortality and the stories we leave to our loved ones when we too depart from this earth. Maybe we don’t really ask ourselves about it, but we dream about it. Or at the back of our minds we question our decisions and ask the “what if” questions. We remember those we’ve already and decidedly left in this life and the marks we made in their hearts. And we could see them in funerals such as this, share another feeling, another embrace, however awkward will still get us thinking. Thinking still of how we, ourselves, made them feel? Hurt? Yes. Happy? A thousand times until you left me. Mad? No, I abhor you. Loved? Sometimes, but I will always will.